


The Night You-Know-Who Disappeared

by LadyBinx



Series: Lucinda Baker [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Death Eaters, Gen, Harry Potter References, No Golden Trio, Original Character Death(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-11
Updated: 2016-12-11
Packaged: 2018-09-07 21:35:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8817013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyBinx/pseuds/LadyBinx
Summary: The night voldemort went missing, Lucinda meets a friend





	

**Author's Note:**

> I set my friend a challenge a few years ago to write me a story set within the HP world that did not include the Golden Trio. These are those stories.

It’s not true, that all Slytherin students go bad. It is true that most wizards that go bad were once in Slytherin, but that’s a wholly different thing. Don’t tar us all with the same brush. Don’t forget Pettigrew.

There are two kinds of student in Slytherin. There’s the big, dumb troll-like bullies, and there’s the twisted, cruel, intelligent ones. The brains all fancy themselves as wolves among the sheep. They enjoy walking through a busy room and thinking about all the things they’ve done that the people around them will never know about, revelling in their superiority. Not like wolves at all.

When I discovered this, of course I realised I was on the intelligent side. But twisted and cruel? I was not. I’m a lot of things – practical, unromantic, angry – but I’m not cruel. In fact I was on the receiving end of cruelty almost all the time.

  
When I was at Hogwarts, there was a lot of fuss about being in Slytherin. It was the time of You-Know-Who. Volde-man. He who must not, etc. The majority of students around me, in my own year, and the lower and upper years, supported him. Some violently. I was Muggle-born. It was hell. If they didn’t actively persecute and bully me, and the very few others like me, then at least they never thought of Volde-man as, say, the Gryffindors did. Your typical Gryffindor would say the V-dude was evil as evil could be. The typical Slytherin, in that time, would say that he was ambitious, powerful, and great, in the classical sense.

  
I only had one friend in Slytherin, and I’m sure he was only hanging around in the vain hope that he’d see me naked. One of the wolves. He was closer to the central figures than me. The night the nameless one was almost destroyed, October 31st, 1981, he came to see me. We met in an alleyway at some ungodly hour of the morning. Technically, I suppose it was November 1st. Three o’clock in the morning. It was raining, which had put me in a hostile mood. I’d Apparated onto a street corner, down the road from an alleyway where he’d demanded we meet.

  
“Lucinda?” he asked, seeing me approach from the other end of the alley.

  
“Mark,” I responded, “What’s all this about?”

  
“It’s about He Who Must Not Be Named.”

  
“The V-man. What’s he done this time?” I asked. Mark took a step towards me, and held up his hands as if to shush me. Maybe he took my dismissive attitude personally.

  
It’s not that I wasn’t scared of the nameless one. I was terrified of him, just like everyone else. But he wasn’t here. Mark was. And Mark is really, really not scary.  
“No, no,” he was saying, “He’s not done anything. Well, he’s done some things. He’s killed Lilly and James Potter.”

  
“Oh, right. But Mark, this is hardly news. He kills people all the time. I’d have heard about it sooner or later. Can I go back to bed now?”

  
James and Lily, and all the rest of them, had been a few years above me in school. But I don’t wear my emotions on my sleeve. They make you vulnerable.  
“No, no, that’s not important,” he insisted. That was nearly enough to shatter my aloof demeanour.

  
Mark has this facial twitch when he gets nervous, and I saw now that his eye was having spasms like crazy. There was something in his anxiousness that was getting to me. He was sweating. He looked as if he hadn’t slept yet. I’d never seen anyone’s eyes literally rolling in horror before.

  
“What’s happened?”

  
“It’s… We… We don’t know,” muttered Mark. “He went to the Potter’s place, and there were explosions… we think… we don’t know what to think. But something has gone wrong. By the time I got there, I couldn’t get very close… I saw that fat handyman from Hogwarts was poking around…”

  
“How did you find the Potters?” I asked, “I heard they were hiding.”

“I don’t know, but I guess they were betrayed by that guy, what’s his name, Narcissa’s brother? Black or something? Wanker, and now a traitor too,” he spat, his nervousness briefly reverting to his habitual petty, judgemental vindictiveness.

I had known Sirius Black, too. I didn’t believe anyone could betray the Potters, least of all him, but someone clearly had.

“What’s gone wrong?” I snapped.

“He… we think he might be dead…” muttered Mark. He looked over his shoulder nervously.

“Black?” I asked, my heart freezing.

“No, no! Our Lord!”

This was a bombshell. This would change everything so much that I couldn’t fully appreciate it at the time. I’d been living under the shadow of the bastard all of my young life, at that point. The Slytherin purebloods picking on a muggle-born had defined my entire experience of school, and indeed the path of my destiny in general. I would need to collect my thoughts. My first concerns were about my own, personal affairs. But they would be sorted out in time too. Mark was in front of me, and all Mark could tell me was what he knew.

“Was it Moody? Alastor Moody?”

“We don’t know,” muttered Mark.

“One of the other Aurors, then?”

“We don’t know!” snapped Mark. He looked over his shoulder, surprised and upset by his sudden outburst. “Some of the followers… the Death Eaters…” he said it timidly, “Are saying he’s not dead. He’s just hiding. No one knows what’s going on, Lucinda.”

“You want me to talk to people, is that it?”

“Well… yes… people…”

“Mark,” I said warningly. We’d had this discussion before.

“If you can call ghosts people, then. And centaurs, and goblins, ghouls and hags, frogs and toads and snakes! Slime and spooks, then yes, I want you to talk to people,” he hissed, frustrated.

This is my profession. I have friends and contacts in all sorts of places, and I make my network work for me. Wizard-kind exists in a wider world full of strange cultures and exotic species and they never have much curiosity about each other. Doing so has made me reasonably powerful, in my own subtle way. Translator, messenger, rumour-monger, even medium.

“Speaking of goblins, I wonder what’ll happen to the V-man’s Gringotts vault,” I wondered out loud. “I bet there’s a whole bunch of stuff in there.”

“Everything will come out in the open now, Lucinda,” whined Mark.

“I’ve not done anything illegal. Well, I’ve not done anything I should be ashamed of. At the very least I’ve never left behind any evidence,” I grinned, “Have you?”

The look on Mark’s face could have killed him. I didn’t know human facial muscles could move like that.

I said there were two kinds of students in Slytherin. The brutes and the brains. But I was wrong: there are technically three kinds of students in Slytherin. The brutish troll goons, the schemers who think they’re wolves, and the third kind. The third kind are much rarer. Like diamonds squeezed from coal, they’re hunters amongst the wolves. Humans are so much more dangerous than animals, but actual wolves are much harder to hunt. The ‘wolves’ of humanity are predictable, delusional, and I can read them like a book. They can be played like musical instruments, even as they betray and destroy you – like violins made of razor blades. Snape knew this. I know this.

When I looked into Mark’s eyes I caught a glimpse of the things he’d done. I saw the true depths of his fear about what awaited him in the future. When the Ministry caught him (and when they did I’d get a good price for it) it would be a short holiday in the courtroom and then straight into wizard prison, Azkaban. I knew that at some point the Dementors would break him. They break everyone, from what I hear. Azkaban can do strange things to a man, they say, but most of those things he has done to himself before he gets there. People twist themselves into all kinds of emotional knots with guilt, fear and self-loathing. Serving the Dark Lord had clearly taken a terrible toll on Mark’s mind, spirit and soul. Sometimes all the Dementors need to do is hold a mirror up to your own despair.

I told you I wasn’t cruel. It was actually mercy when I bludgeoned Mark to death. Magic might be amazing, but there aren’t many spells that can protect against being beaten over the skull with a thick metal pipe.


End file.
